Saturday, August 25, 2012

In a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 94 percent of the African Americans said they intended to vote for Barack Obama; 0 percent for Mitt Romney.The racial divide is stark. While the poll does not delve into motives as to why absolutely none of the African Americans polled would vote for Romney, the reasons are abundantly clear. On the MSNBC show, The Cycle, Toure' called it Romney's "niggerization" of Obama. Toure' cited a specific example of what he meant from a speech Romney gave in Chillicothe, Ohio:

“I mean, that really bothered me. You notice he said ‘anger’ twice. He’s really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the ‘otherization’ — ‘he’s not like us.’”

“I know it’s a heavy thing, I don’t say it lightly, but this is niggerization. ‘You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.’

Toure' later apologized for his use of the word "niggerization" at the apparent insistence of MSNBC, but he identified a campaign ploy Romney has used since he first announced he was running for president. Romney's entire criticism of Obama is based upon his contention that Obama fits the white stereotype named by the word nigger.

From the outset, Romney has denigrated the person of Barack Obama. He has persistently focused not on the flaws he contends are in Obama's policies, but on the contention that Obama is inherently unfit and incapable. Part of that is from the habitual self-inflating notion of business people that only they are capable of managing and running things, but Romney's denigrations of Obama define all those aspects of inferiority that white supremacists attribute to African Americans. Romney does everything but use the word nigger. His tactic is what Toure' terms niggerization.

This tactic is certainly not lost on the black community, as is indicated by the 0 percent of blacks who would vote for Romney. Nor is it lost on anyone who lived through and was politically active during the civil rights era. Romney's campaign harks right back to the claims of racial inferiority that the segregationists clung to and invoked so fervently.

The attitude of superiority and patronization that some whites still have toward blacks accounts for the disparities between the races. There is good, justifiable reason for anger in the black community because of an attitude that invokes all the denigrations, humiliations, and repressions of slavery. Many whites who grow indignant at the suggestion that they might evince racist attitudes cannot conceive of why black communities remain distrustful, cynical, and alienated when whites suggest that the problems in minority communities would be solved if the people would just become more like whites. This is just the message that the GOP is trying to martial its forces around.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Romney speaks for the ten percent, who strive to concentrate the country's wealth in their hands and to control the rest of the population by holding it for ransom, saying that if the serfdom submits and obeys the managing class, perhaps the ten percent will dole out something in the way of a reward. It is not just the black communities who have reason to resent and revolt against the patronizing and insulting attitude that the ten percent holds toward the rest of the population. The crucial political question is how long it will take for the 90 percent of Americans to to understand the implications of that attitude.

During the heat of the civil rights movement, a black leader I knew had become disillusioned by an attitude that was apparent within the movement. He said the for too many the American dream was not the realization of living by the rules of equality, justice, and opportunity but the dream held by many was to "give everyone someone to call nigger." True equality of opportunity, he thought, was held in bondage by the bourgeois notions of status.

The conservative movement in America has, indeed, regressed back into attitudes that justify exclusion and repression. Anyone who tends toward more liberal values is quickly labeled unpatriotic, socialist, Marxist, unionists, "not one of us." The claim that there is faction of people who do not want to work and carry their own weight but want to freeload off those who do work has regained currency. It is incomprehensible to the managing class that what the 90 percent objects to and resents is working under the terms of abject servitude which requires deference and obeisance to and dependency on the masters.

The racial divide is widening, as minorities and women realize the realities of the attitude with which they are regarded by the corporate culture. The 0 percent of blacks who incline toward Romney is just an indication of the growing divide that defines the essential difference between the major political parties. The question is whether the Occupy Wall Street movement of a year ago will become the Occupy America movement this November. To the managing class, niggerization is not limited to people of color. Everybody, except them, qualifies.

1 comment:

Saw my first of these hateful bumper stickers last week in Meade County, hometown to "amend the Voting Rights Act" Attorney General Jackley. Tweak the language in any manner they chose, but the result remains divisive, patronizing, and regressive.